Bit error rate analysis of a MIMO-generalized frequency division multiplexing scheme for 5th generation cellular systems

Generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) is a non-orthogonal multi-carrier transmission scheme based on the filter bank approach. It provides more flexibility than Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which makes it a promising candidate for the physical layer techniques of 5th generation cellular systems. In this paper, we present a GFDM based transmission scheme containing both transmitting and receiving modules, and make a comparison between GFDM and OFDM in many aspects like signal models, out-of-band (OOB) radiation and bit error rate (BER). We applied multiple-input multiple-output generalized frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-GFDM) by integrating time-reverse space time coding and GFDM to remit the reduction of error performance caused by frequency-selective channels. Simulation results show that the GFDM not only achieves good BER performance in both AWGN and frequency-selective channels, but also outperforms OFDM in dealing with some challenges that the 5th generation cellular systems will face, such as spectral efficiency and latency. Moreover, MIMO-GFDM makes a much better BER performance than SISO-GFDM because of the diversity gain.